Black Award-Profitable Screenwriter Detained As a result of Of A Karen

[ad_1] by Daniel Johnson September 20, 2025

O'Keefe is finest identified for his work on FX's 'The Bear' and a speechwriter for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

Alex O’Keefe, an award-winning screenwriter finest identified for his work on FX’s “The Bear” and a speechwriter for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), was just lately pulled off an MTA prepare headed for Connecticut by the police as a result of a white girl on board complained about his posture.

In accordance with a video posted to O’Keefe’s official Instagram account on Sept. 18, “I used to be arrested on the MTA prepare to Connecticut right now, pulled off, handcuffed, and detained. An previous white girl obtained on the prepare and instantly pointed at me and instructed me to right how I used to be sitting. I refused, so she went to the conductor and complained. The conductor referred to as the police and stopped the prepare. Whereas ready for the police to reach, the previous Karen’s good friend stated, ‘You’re not the minority anymore.'” O’Keefe doesn't point out the place he was touring from to get to Connecticut.

O’Keefe continued, “The police instructed me to go away the prepare, I refused and requested what was I doing illegally. They stated I used to be disturbing the peace by not leaving the prepare. They pulled me off the prepare and arrested me with out even speaking to the Karen who reported the one black individual on the prepare. On the platform, the police detained me and interrogated me. Solely black of us stayed close by and recorded the arrest. After I demanded a lawyer and reminded them they didn’t even take a press release from the lady who complained they ultimately launched me. This nation is rising extra psycho by the day. What is going to you do about it?”

O’Keefe’s ordeal mirrored a well-known sample of white people weaponizing the police, pushed by racial bias and the idea that Black individuals are inherently prison, even when the targets are law-abiding residents.

The incident was recorded by one other rider and goes viral on TikTok.

@priyaxistingcondition Outdated Mom Karen complaining to the MTA conductor as a result of she didn’t like how Alex O’Keefe was sitting is wild work. The conductor stopping the prepare and calling 12 is wild work. What Alex was instructed whereas they had been ready for 12 is wild work. What has previous mom Karen contributed to society besides Ray Cyst?! Thanks to @nalae 🖤 to your wonderful video, I hope this helps get the phrase out! Thanks @Barbara.J.W52 me of their video. I needed to re-edit for a nasty edit! Adore you! #MTA #connecticut #author #bear

♬ authentic sound – Priya Xisting

In 2018, Khalil Muhammad, a professor of historical past, race and public coverage at Harvard College, mentioned the rise of recorded incidents of white residents calling the police on Black folks within the context of the primary Trump administration with NPR‘s Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

In accordance with Muhammad, “Our present president ran as a ‘law-and-order’ candidate in a rustic with a protracted historical past the place the notion of utilizing the police because the foot troopers of controlling African-Individuals, limiting their freedom, deciding that they're certainly second-class residents and implementing these legal guidelines after they had been authorized on this nation is a very huge a part of the issue. And to evoke that mantra, to run on that mantra, to elicit the assist of your complete group {of professional} police companies signifies that we’ve now obtained residents who're enjoying out this coverage alternative — this set of politics.”

Muhammad’s evaluation stays related. Throughout Trump’s second marketing campaign, he made fewer direct references to being a “law-and-order” candidate, although some observers contend the theme was already effectively established by then.

“On the opposite facet of the ledger, individuals who had been combating in opposition to this type of ethos in our nation — this very punitive, racialized ethos — need to withstand this now, so that they’re more likely to drag out their cellphones … and due to cellphone video and its ubiquitous function on this dialog, all of us are bearing witness to the issue,” Muhammad famous.

Vesla Mae Weaver, a Bloomberg Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins College and co-author of a number of books on race and democracy, famous in a 2018 Vox op-ed that white people repeatedly use the police as a private safety drive as a result of the tactic continues to be efficient, a sample mirrored in O’Keefe’s expertise.

“The breezy deployment of police by whites at Yale, at Starbucks, Walmart, and in different social areas vividly reveals how white folks use legislation enforcement to exert management over their fellow Black Individuals…The Yale scholar (a white scholar who referred to as the police on a napping Black scholar on the college in 2018) was not, so far as we all know, trying to thwart police from discovering her personal wrongdoing,” Weaver wrote. “However her enlistment of police was racially strategic, meant to marshal current stereotypes of Blacks to reconfigure her house and dispense with a Black individual. It suits a societal algorithm that blackness itself is suspect.”

Though a few states have since handed legal guidelines criminalizing calls to the police that “unlawfully discriminate” or goal “protected courses,” as Brian Levin, a criminologist who directs the Middle for the Research of Hate and Extremism at California State College at San Bernardino, instructed The Washington Submit in 2020, the higher resolution is confronting the latent racism inside American society.